WiFi theremin

The fine folks at Midnight Research Labs have put together a new toy for you to play with. It’s a Python script that makes your WiFi hardware behave more like a theremin. Based on the pyaudio library it monitors the signal strength of the AP you’re connected to and changes the tone accordingly. There’s a sample embedded above (direct link). If you have a second interface, you can use it to modulate the volume. It’s an interesting trick, but they say that there’s enough latency that it would be hard to play actual music with it.

Seems this would work better if you did it with the RSSI level from a Bluetooth device. Since the range is so low it should react faster to changes in distance. On my machine, moving my phone even a few inches is usually enough for it to tick over to the next signal level.